When Sears & Roebuck were the industry disrupters
With Sears now in decline and fading fast it is interesting to look back at how this mighty giant was once a major threat to established brick and mortar stores at its founding. Richard...
Life Writ Large Blog
Digital Tutorial: Creating the Santa Fe Boxcar
Software Used I used Adobe Photoshop along with a logo that was initially created in Adobe Illustrator. However, you could do this tutorial entirely with the free and open-source application Gimp. Blank Rectangular Canvas...
Cemetery Tale: A near nuclear disaster over Albuquerque
A B-29 with a crew of 13 crashed into the Manzano Mountains about 3 minutes after taking off from Kirtland Air Force base, at 9:41pm on 11 April, 1950. The plane and crew had...
Cemetery Tales: The Japanese Internment Camp Detainees of Santa Fe
A reader sent me the photo of a grave stone with Japanese characters and asked if I knew any details about it. Their (correct) assumption was that the tombstone was related to the victims...
Cemetery Tales: The Odd Sandstone Tombstone in the Santa Fe National Cemetery
I recently started taking cemetery photos for the website FindAGrave.com. The site has been useful to me in my genealogy research and this is my way of giving back. The way it works is...
Uncle Otto’s Final Mission
23 July 1945. That is the date my Uncle Otto Anthony Mittelstadt and his plane, a model F4U-4 Corsair only months old, disappeared off the coast of Okinawa just as WWII was coming to...
Violent Football, Witchcraft, and the King James Bible: Another Gunter Connection Tale
European football can be (and has been) a brutal sport. So much so that during its formative years in England it was banned several times strictly because of the violence among players or among...
Distant cousin and scientist extraordinaire, Edmund Gunter
Distant cousin Edmund Gunter (b. 1581, Hertfordshire; d. 10 December 1626, London) has been a thorn in my side for some time now. While searching early newspapers and other publications for any information related...
Postcard Story: Sympathy in Polo, Illinois – 1916
Unlike the last postcard, the Easter greeting that didn’t excite me all that much, this card melted me. Such a sincere and compassionate outpouring of grief seems in stark contrast to modern day sugary...
Postcard Story: A Happy Easter
My criteria for purchasing old postcards could be described loosely as follows. They should picture an interesting place or location. They should be personalized, that is, they should have a message written on them...
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